In Awe of Agency (Back to the Futures #14)
This month has been the busiest yet in the journey so far and it has also brought us back to something we keep returning to in foresight: the quiet power of agency, and the almost awe-inspiring fact that so much is still open, still shapeable, still in motion.
Here in Denmark, it has been election time, which is always a reminder that even in a world full of noise, uncertainty, and polarization, there are still places where people show up, listen, argue, vote, participate, and try to influence the direction ahead. We are fortunate to live in a democracy where political life is still something people actively engage in, and where different views can meet in public rather than only retreat into their own corners.
That matters for foresight too.
For us, one of the most beautiful things about working with the futures is that it creates a space where no one has the full answer, because no one can. It's been clear across the 12 sessions, we have hosted throughout March. The futures are inherently unknowable, and that can feel unsettling, but they can also be deeply generative. It levels the room in a certain way. Titles, expertise, and certainty still matter, of course, but they matter differently when the conversation turns toward something that has not happened yet.
And because the futures are not settled, we have agency.
We can shape, challenge, redirect, and create. We can decide what to strengthen, what to let go of, what to resist, and what to build. That is easy to forget in times like these, where so much can feel accelerated, individualized, and beyond our control. But again and again, we find that when people come together to think seriously, honestly, and imaginatively about what lies ahead, something shifts.
At its best, foresight is exactly that kind of collective spirit. It is constructive conversation, shared discovery, and a way of leaving the room a little sharper, a little more prepared, and a little more aware of both the complexity of the world and the possibility of acting within it.
That feeling, that futures are not simply awaiting us but asking something of us is amazing to think of.
Let’s get into it.
LOOKING BACK
📍 Impact Foresight Project (Pro-bono)
We have now kicked off the Impact Foresight Project and will host our first session in early April together with Ungdomsbureauet. The process, titled Fremtidens Ungdomsliv 2036, explores what is shaping young people’s lives, participation, and agency toward 2036, and how that can inform a clearer strategic direction. What makes this especially meaningful is not only the strong values fit, but also the timing: Ungdomsbureauet is entering a new strategy period, which means the work can feed directly into real decisions and priorities. Just as importantly, the process is designed to include young people from their wider network as part of the actual foresight journey. That feels like a strong example of futures thinking as civic capability in practice, and exactly the kind of participatory, decision-relevant work we hoped this pro-bono initiative could make possible.
📍 Causal Layered Analysis — Pan-African think-and-do tank
One of the strongest applicants to the Impact Foresight Project was a pan-African think-and-do tank working at the intersection of systems change, impact, and foresight. While we did not move forward with the full pro-bono strategy process together, we did facilitate a half-day Causal Layered Analysis workshop with Development Dynamics in March. The session moved from surface-level symptoms and system drivers down into worldviews and myths, before rebuilding upward toward a clearer preferred future narrative. What stood out was how quickly the conversation moved beyond abstract strategy language and into deeper questions of identity, legitimacy, and direction. We closed by translating the work into four practical pillars — identity, mission, offering, and structure — creating a stronger shared story for what they are becoming and how they want to move forward.
📍 The Foresight Facilitator — Live Learning Experience
In March, Darwin Sy Antipolo and Mathias hosted the pilot cohort of The Foresight Facilitator, a live learning experience for people who want to get better at designing, delivering, and debriefing futures sessions. The first session was also a healthy reminder that facilitation itself is always a learning practice. We had perhaps packed a little too much into the initial design, which felt fitting in a course about exactly that challenge: how to hold ambition, energy, timing, and clarity at once. The engagement from the group was strong throughout, and the whole experience reaffirmed something we care deeply about: foresight does not land just through good frameworks, but through how the room is held, how participation is invited, and how learning is turned into something people can carry with them afterwards.
📍 Leaders Visit in Copenhagen — Democracy, anticipatory leadership, human + artificial intelligence
We hosted a group of visiting executives in Copenhagen for a half-day session at Thoravej 29 focused on democracy, anticipatory leadership, and how to work more wisely with both human and artificial intelligence. Using Denmark as a living case rather than a model to copy, the session explored how trust, transparency, participation, and accountability can be understood as practical design choices for coordination under complexity. Together with partners from We Do Democracy, DareDisrupt, NORDIC INSITE, and Turningpoint Leadership, we linked democratic practice to leadership capability and asked what it takes to make good decisions when the future is still unclear. It became a conversation about feedback loops, guardrails, judgment, and the kind of leadership that is tech-driven, human-centered, and anticipatory at the same time.
📍 Youth Research on Technology and Futures
We kicked off a new research project exploring young people’s relationship with technology and the futures, with a particular focus on how agency, anxiety, and possibility are experienced as AI becomes more ambient in everyday life. It is a space where questions of access, identity, imagination, and power meet very directly, and where the future is already being lived in uneven ways. We are excited to keep digging into this over the coming months.
📍 Circles — Megatrends + Data as a Strategic Resource
March also included four leadership circles: two focused on megatrends and two on data as a strategic resource. What became clear in the latter is that while AI currently dominates the conversation, data is still what quietly carries much of the actual work. Good inputs, clear governance, ownership, validation, and shared standards remain essential if organizations want durable value rather than a layer of experimentation without direction. Across the megatrends sessions as well, the task has been similar: helping leaders connect large shifts to practical choices, and turning broad complexity into something that can support judgment, prioritization, and action.
📍 Startup Growth Programme — Alumni Session
Mathias returned to the AKA Startup Growth Programme as an alumni speaker to share reflections from nearly three years of building ANTICIPATE. It was a chance to speak honestly about experimentation, consistency, self-discipline, branding, community, and the long learning curve of building something from scratch. More than anything, it was a reminder that entrepreneurship can be one of the clearest ways to experience agency directly. Starting something of your own forces you to confront uncertainty, make choices before you feel fully ready, and realise that futures are not only something to analyse, but something to build into being.
📍 Podcast Recordings (x2)
We recorded two podcast conversations this month that we are excited to share soon: one on new visions and blueprints for the futures, and another on thinking forward as a discipline. Both opened up rich conversations about how we imagine, communicate, and work with change in a time where many people feel stretched between urgency and uncertainty.
📍 Tomorrow Matters — AI Panels Series and Circle
Across three public talks and panels as part of Tomorrow Matters with Bühlmann Hotels, we saw the AI conversation continue to mature. Less energy went into the usual promises of tools for everything, and more into questions of governance, responsibility, organizational design, and what real value actually looks like. Our role in those rooms has been to help separate deeper signals of transformation from shorter hype cycles, and to support more grounded conversations about what organizations are really building when they say they are “doing AI".
LOOKING AHEAD
📍 Future Foresight Module in Abu Dhabi
In April, Mathias heads to Abu Dhabi to deliver a future foresight module for public sector leaders, focused on how to work more systematically with uncertainty, long-term change, and strategic anticipation in practice. It is always encouraging to see this level of interest from public institutions looking to strengthen not only their understanding of change, but their ability to act on it in more structured and forward-looking ways.
📍 Impact Foresight Project — Youth Futures workshops
We continue the Impact Foresight Project with Ungdomsbureauet through two core workshops on Scanning and Scenarios, both focused on the futures of youth. The aim is to move from signals and shifts shaping young people’s lives today into a more considered discussion about what different futures of youth participation, agency, and everyday life could look like toward 2036, and what that means strategically for the organisation.
📍 ConsilioCircles on AI
Two more leadership circles are coming up, both centered on AI. The ambition remains the same as in our recent talks and panels: to move beyond surface-level enthusiasm or fear and toward more grounded conversations about responsibility, organizational design, governance, and the kinds of decisions leaders need to make when the technology is evolving faster than the structures around it.
📍 WFBB Delegation Visit — Futures of the Øresund Region
We will be co-hosting a delegation visit and networking event connected to the futures of the Øresund region, bringing together actors across Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. It is a chance to explore regional collaboration, innovation, and long-term opportunity in a part of the world that continues to show how cross-border ecosystems can create real momentum when they are actively cultivated.
📍 Cultural Foresight Masterclass
The next and final masterclass in our current series with Chloé de Ruffray is coming up soon, and this one feels especially close to home. Cultural Foresight is about getting better at reading culture as early futures insight and translating what we notice into something decision-relevant. Not trend-chasing, but deeper interpretation. The rituals that disappear. The new desires that emerge. The symbols, narratives, moods, and norms that quietly reshape what becomes possible, acceptable, or attractive. In the session, we will move from cultural signals to patterns, shifts, and strategy, and explore how cultural approaches can work together with more classic strategic foresight tools. Join the waitlist here
📍 Parsons Guest Lecture
Mathias will also guest lecture for Parsons on foresight in relation to trend research and forecasting, continuing a conversation that feels increasingly relevant across design, strategy, and innovation: how we move from observing change to making better sense of what it might mean.
📍 Democratising Futures Talk for Speculative Futures NZ
Later in April, Mathias will speak with Design Futures Aotearoa in New Zealand on Democratising Futures (Thinking): Why It Matters — and How to Do It. The session will explore why futures thinking cannot stay locked inside expert circles, leadership off-sites, or strategy decks, and what it takes to make it more participatory, usable, and action-oriented across organizations and communities.
📍 Youth Research — Focus Groups
We are also moving into the next phase of our youth research project with a set of focus groups exploring young people’s relationship with technology and the futures. These conversations will help us better understand how young people experience agency, anxiety, imagination, and possibility as digital systems and AI become more deeply embedded in everyday life.
💡 SPOTLIGHT
📍 Futures of Energy — where it all started
Did you know the very first ANTICIPATE project was on the futures of energy?It wasn’t a coincidence. Energy sits underneath almost everything else: how we live, move, produce, eat, and organise society.
When it shifts, it rarely stays contained within the sector. It ripples outward into economies, politics, and everyday life.In Strategizing for the Futures of Energy (2023), we worked with a new leadership team in an energy company at a moment where things were going well on the surface. Strong performance, positive outlook. And yet, a clear sense that long-term risks and structural shifts could not be ignored.The process combined preparation, participation, and pressure-testing:
A futures brief and pre-work to align before entering the room
Three days of workshops exploring capabilities, revenue streams, and future roles
Scenario work focused on key uncertainties, ripple effects, and decisions that would need to hold across different futures
Around the same time, we also framed what we kept seeing across the sector as The 5Ds of Energy:
Decentralize — from central grids to distributed systems and prosumers
Decarbonize — transition pressure, policy volatility, shifting investments
Digitize — AI, data, digital twins, and rising cyber risk
Demand — electrification, data centres, and uneven consumption patterns
Diversify — new mixes across renewables, hydrogen, nuclear, and storage
Which is also why we keep insisting on working with wild cards and less comfortable futures. Not as an intellectual exercise, but because in energy, the cost of being unprepared is rarely abstract. It is felt directly by people, communities, and entire economies.
→ Read the full case
✴️ RECOMMENDATION
📍 Future Days is coming to Copenhagen
Future Days is coming to Copenhagen this June, and we’re genuinely excited about it.We joined the festival in Lisbon last year, and it was one of those rare events that stays with you afterwards. Not just because of the content, but because of the atmosphere. Open, curious, and grounded in a shared interest in shaping better futures.
Now it’s landing here with the theme Currents of Tomorrow (10–12 June 2026), and they have just announced the venue: Skuespilhuset (The Playhouse), which feels like a perfect setting for the kind of conversations they are aiming to host.If you are working with futures, strategy, design, or just care about where things are heading, this is one of the gatherings worth paying attention to.
→ Read more about the Copenhagen edition→ Explore the festival
🌀 ARTICLE
📍 New paths for collective action in the age of hyperpolitics
In a time where polarization, complexity, and constant reaction risk fragmenting our ability to act together, the question of how we coordinate across differences becomes increasingly important.In this piece, we explore what it means to work with collective action when shared realities are less stable, and where futures thinking can play a role in rebuilding common ground without simplifying the challenges we face.
Back to the Futures is your monthly glimpse into what we’re doing at ANTICIPATE. If you’d like to collaborate, bring foresight into your work, or just stay more plugged into the futures space, we’d love to hear from you at hi@anticipate.dk.
Until next time, stay curious.
— The ANTICIPATE Team
